A feud followed in which many people took--and changed--sides. Lydia fought gayly, briskly in the open. Her object was not Blythe's death, but his social extinction, and her method was not cold steel but ridicule. The war was won when May was made to see him as an impossible figure, comic, on the make--as perhaps he was, but no more so than when Lydia herself had received him. After this, though he lingered on a few days at a hotel, his ultimate disappearance was certain. Lydia and May remained friends throughout--as much friends as they had ever been. Since the day of their first meeting the two women had never permitted any man to be a friend of both of them.
Albee came and spent a brief twenty-four hours with her between a midnight train and Sunday boat. He was in the midst of a campaign as United States senator from his own state--certain of election. Lydia was kind and patient with him, but frankly bored.
"There's more stuff in Bobby," she confided to Benny, "who doesn't expect you to tremble at his nod. I hate fake strong men. I always feel tempted to call their bluff. It's a hard rôle they want to play. If they don't break you, you despise them. If they do--why, you're broken, no good to anyone."
She asked Eleanor to come and spend August with her, but Eleanor refused, saying, what was true enough, that she couldn't bear Newport. She could bear even less constant association with Lydia at this moment. Lydia's one preoccupation when they were together was to destroy Eleanor's friendship for O'Bannon. Often in old times Eleanor had laughed at the steady persistence that Lydia put into this sort of campaign of hate, but she could not laugh now, for as a matter of fact her friendship with O'Bannon was already destroyed. She hardly saw him, and if she did there was a veil between them. He was kind, he was open with her, he was everything except interested.
Eleanor loved O'Bannon, but with so intellectual a process that she was not far wrong in considering it was a friendship. She would have married him if he had asked her, but she would have done so principally to insure herself of his company. If anyone could have guaranteed that they would continue all their lives to live within a few yards of each other she would have been content--content even with the knowledge that every now and then some other less reasonable woman would come and sweep him away from her. She knew he was of a temperament susceptible to terrible gusts of emotion, but she considered that that was her hold upon him--she was so safe.